Our project was to make a papier mâché face mask of an animal for Furry Friends week. Ellie had decided to make a pig, because pink was her favourite colour and a flamingo was ‘too hard’.
‘Look,’ she said, holding up her almost-finished mask. ‘It’s Jasmine.’ She held it up to her face and mimicked Jasmine’s voice, adding in some piggy squeals.
I giggled, even though I knew it was kind of mean. ‘Oh wait,’ Ellie said. ‘The nose isn’t pushed up high enough.’
I held up my own mask, which I was quite proud of. It was modelled after our toy poodle, Lipstick, except I’d exaggerated the eyes with big thick lashes and added extra pink bows to the masses of pale yellow wool I’d used to make her fur. ‘This one could be you,’ I said, without thinking, because somehow they really did look the same.
Ellie stared at me and I thought for a second she was going to papier mâché my mouth shut. But then she giggled. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I never realised I looked like Lipstick before.’ She reached over to the paint palette. ‘There’s nowhere near enough pink, though,’ she added. She dabbed some pale pink paint onto her brush but instead of putting it on the papier mâché Lipstick, she swiped it on the end of my nose.
‘Ellie!’ I exclaimed, getting her back with the yellow that was on the end of my own brush. But she dodged it and I got it on her school dress instead. ‘Whoops, sorry!’
‘You will be,’ said Ellie, reaching for more paint.
Then we got into a paint fight, which resulted in us getting sent outside to wash all the art brushes in a bucket of hot soapy water. Usually I hate getting in trouble, and avoid it, but because this time it meant sitting in the sun with Ellie, laughing and dripping water off the balcony onto unsuspecting students below, I thought that, just this time, it was okay.
So the fact that we were kind of friends again made me feel as if Ellie might just be open to me bringing up the Junior routine.
I decided to put my ideas into action, make up some choreography and show her at our next practice.
But to do this I had to call upon the one and only Benji.
I stayed an extra half hour with him after our next ballroom lesson so I could go over some sequences. My dance had to be perfect when I showed Ellie – I really wanted to wow her.
Luckily, Benji was equally as good at choreographing as he was at dancing. Soon we were flinging moves back and forth along with our ideas and crafting something that was even more amazing than I thought it would be.
‘Maybe it should have been me and you making up the dance,’ I joked, as I leant over to catch my breath.
‘Ah, I wouldn’t want you to get sick of me,’ Benji joked back.
I flushed because I wanted to say that I would never get sick of him, that I loved dancing with him and that he was the perfect partner and even more perfect at getting me to lighten up and have fun. I wanted to say that since he’d been my partner he’d become as important to me as my Silver Shoes girls and it made me so happy, how easy our friendship was now.
But I knew he would just think it was girly, so I didn’t say anything.
By the time the Juniors’ practice rolled round, I was feeling really positive and even excited.
I made sure Benji and I left our ballroom practice a little early and raced with him to studio one, where Ellie was already warming up in the mirror.
‘Hey Ellie,’ I said, walking through the door.
She looked up from her side stretch in second position. ‘Hey Paige,’ she said, then caught sight of Benji. ‘Oh. Hi there, Benji. What brings you to the studio with Paige?’
She was pursing her lips in a cheeky smile that I knew meant she understood exactly why Benji was following me into the studio (she’d kept trying to tell me Benji was madly in love with me and vice versa). I widened my eyes at her to shush her up.
‘Well, I’m here to help Paige out,’ Benji said, speaking up for me. ‘We’ve got something to show you.’
‘Aww, aren’t I lucky?’ Ellie said, jumping up.
‘Yes,’ I said, and cleared my throat. ‘I wanted to show you some stuff that I’ve come up with for our dance. Like, the kind of stuff I was telling you about the other day. I mean, it’s just ideas and everything, but yeah …’
Ellie shrugged and leant back against the mirror. ‘Go on, then,’ she said, with the same pursed-lip smile.
I quietly breathed a sigh of relief. She seemed to be taking it well. Maybe this would work, after all.
I dashed over to the sound system to put the music on. Benji’s cousin had put it on a CD for me. It was a song called ‘Candyman’ but a remix version that had a bit more of a jive feel to it, with a slightly more uptempo beat, to match the rhythm that the dance had to follow.
I took my place opposite Benji. I really, really hoped we’d both nail it.
Which we did, of course, because we were so excited about what we’d created together and keen to show it off. I’d kept note of Ellie’s choreography from the last lesson and tried to jazz up the jive with a bit of her style, so it was a perfect blend of our two ideas.
So while Benji and I did our partner work, with the turns and holds and lifts, we also did a lot more moves on our own, like kicks and arm jives and hip shimmies, all of which we extended a little more, with slightly changed or exaggerated angles, to match the over-the-topness of Ellie’s dance.
I really thought Benji and I were onto a winner.
At the end of the routine, Benji spun me out, and I turned into my final pose, grinning, looking towards Ellie.
I was so sure she’d be proud of me, that she’d be as excited as I was.
Instead, her face looked stormy and her chin had a familiar stubborn jut to it.
Uh oh.
‘I hate it,’ she said.
Chapter Nine
The amazing feeling of lightness that the dance had given me left my body, and was replaced with some kind of swampy sludge that made my thoughts feel thick.
‘Say what you really feel,’ Benji said to Ellie. ‘Don’t hold back.’ Then he made a face at me like ‘Can you believe it?’
Maybe I was silly, but I really couldn’t. I felt for sure that Ellie had come around. But her face right now said otherwise.
Ellie sighed and tapped her fingers against the mirror behind her. ‘Okay, I don’t hate it,’ she said. ‘But it’s really mean of you to come in here and do that, Paige.’
‘What?’ Benji and I said at the same time.
‘Well, you come in here and bring Benji with you to gang up on me,’ Ellie cried, pushing off the mirror and taking a step towards us with her hands out. ‘How do you think that makes me feel?’
‘Ellie!’ I said, inching closer to Benji for support. ‘We didn’t do it to gang up on you. I just wanted to show you what I’d come up with, and how it might work with what you’ve already done.’
‘But it doesn’t fit, does it?’ Ellie shouted. To my surprise, tears sparkled in her eyes. ‘Your dance doesn’t go with “Applause”. Sure, maybe the beat is similar but the lyrics don’t go. The ideas are completely different. It will just look dumb. Everyone will laugh at us!’
My brain was still sludgy. I didn’t understand why Ellie was so upset when I felt like I was the one who was being bullied into a dance I hadn’t even had a say in.
Benji coughed nervously. ‘Girls,’ he said. ‘There’s no need to fight. Surely you can work something out together.’
‘I’m sorry, Benji,’ I whispered to him. ‘I didn’t mean for you to get caught up in this.’
‘So you apologise to him, but you aren’t sorry to me?’ Ellie burst out. ‘I’m the one who’s being ganged up on! I’m the one whose dance has been called so stupid that you don’t even want to try to do it!’
‘I never said it was stupid!’ I shouted back, surprising even myself.
I couldn’t understand why Ellie was so worked up, but it was making me upset. It was just a dance! Weren’t we supposed to love dancing, and find i
t fun? Why was it suddenly causing a huge fight between us?
‘Then why don’t you want to do it?’ Ellie shouted. ‘You’ve never had a problem with the dances I’ve made up for us before. What, this one isn’t good enough for Little Miss Ballroom Champion?’
At that moment the door to the studio burst open and Ash stuck her head in.
‘Wowee,’ she said, walking into the room. ‘That’s some serious lung power you guys are using.’
‘Hey Ash,’ said Benji. ‘What are you doing?’ He seemed almost relieved at having something else to focus on besides the two moody girls busting his eardrums.
‘I’m just oh so quietly and humbly trying to take all the old Blu-Tack off the walls,’ Ash said, nodding outside. ‘I think the real question here is, what are you guys doing? What’s all the yelling about?’ She nudged Benji in the side. ‘Are they fighting over you, Romeo? You little heartbreaker, you.’
When neither Ellie nor I chimed in with what we were really fighting about, Benji rolled his eyes. ‘They’re fighting because they can’t agree on the dance they’re supposed to choreograph together.’
Ellie looked away out the viewing window, and I stared down at the floor.
‘Gosh!’ Benji threw up his hands. ‘Ellie wants to do a modern jazz number about being ultra famous and Paige wants to do a jive number about young Hollywood starlets having fun, and you know what else? They’d better decide soon, because the class they’re supposed to teach is about to walk in the door!’
I closed my eyes. That was the last thing we needed.
‘Guys,’ Ashley said. ‘You’ve gotta sort this out. Come on, you’ve done a million routines before, and you work great together. Don’t ruin it now.’
‘It’s already ruined.’
What?
I opened my eyes to find Ellie staring at me, looking hurt and disappointed. ‘It’s already ruined,’ she repeated. ‘I don’t want to make up a dance with you, Paige, if you hate what I’ve done.’
‘Now I know what they mean when they talk about creative differences,’ Benji muttered.
Ellie ignored him. ‘I’m sorry, Paige,’ she said. ‘But maybe we shouldn’t do this together, after all.’
Chapter Ten
I ran out of the studio after that, and hid myself on the old bench among the rosebushes. I pulled my knees up to my chest and thought that this was perhaps the worst fight Ellie and I had ever had.
I mean, we’d had little arguments but we’d never shouted at each other before! When Ellie told me that maybe we shouldn’t do this together anymore, it felt like she didn’t just mean the dance, she meant our entire friendship!
I heard footsteps come down the crunchy pebbled path and swiped at my eyes. I put my chin down onto my knees so I wouldn’t have to look at whoever it was – I felt like I couldn’t face anyone.
‘Um, so, I’m not very good at this.’ The bench creaked as Benji perched on the other end of it. ‘But I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.’
He cleared his throat and I heard him picking at a stray splinter on the bench. It made me smile just a little. Poor Benji. Getting caught in the middle of a girly fight was probably his idea of a worst nightmare! But it was very sweet that he’d come to check in on me.
‘I’ll be okay,’ I whispered. ‘We’ve never got angry at each other like that before. And all over dancing! It’s just the weirdest. Dancing was the thing that brought us together!’
Ellie and I met when we were tinies and doing the kindy ballet class at Silver Shoes. I remember I’d been so nervous and didn’t want to leave Mum’s side, despite her pushing me into the classroom. I mean, I’m still pretty shy now, but I was even shyer back then!
It was Ellie, loud, girly, bouncing around Ellie, who had come over and taken my hand and twirled around with me until we were both so dizzy we fell on the floor, giggling. Then she’d given me her special charm bracelet to wear. It was a little string of plastic pearls with ballet slippers attached at the end.
‘It’s for good luck,’ she told me, and when I tried to give it back to her at the end of class she said I could keep it because I was her new dancing best friend!
So imagine how excited we’d been the following week when, on the first day of prep, we ran into each other in the cloakroom. We were in the same class, at the SAME school!
From then on, we were joined at the hip and did everything together. My best memories of Ellie usually involve dancing in some way.
Like when we won the ‘Little Miss Twinkle-toes’ awards for our duo when we were six and got two handmade tutus from the designer for the Australian Ballet. And when we did a Hawaiian dance at our grade three talent show and Ellie’s grass skirt fell off, showing the whole class her Tinkerbell undies, which made us giggle so much we couldn’t finish the dance.
Even stupid things, like one day when it was so cold it almost snowed and the netball courts were really slippery and sleety. Ellie and I pretended we were ice skaters and thought we were so cool until I fell over and broke my little finger.
And last year in our grade four Christmas play when we both got to be the sugarplum fairies together and this girl called Emma hated us because she wanted to be one too but got made an elf, so she kept hiding our costumes. So we put super glue on her dressing room chair, which she sat on while she was doing her make-up, and when she got up it ripped a hole in her pants.
We laughed so much we almost missed our cue.
Afterwards I made Ellie go with me to apologise.
She was just absolutely my best friend, and in every competition, eisteddfod, exam or audition, it was always Ellie by my side, sharing my excitement and calming my nerves and telling me one day we would be big stars together.
And now the thing we both loved the most had caused us to have an argument.
‘Paige?’ I felt a little tickle on my ear and I looked up from my knees, broken out of my thoughts. Benji was holding a miniature rose near my face, one that he’d obviously picked from the garden. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘A flower from the most handsome man in the universe. I hope this cheers you up.’
‘Benji!’ I scolded. ‘You didn’t prick yourself on a thorn getting that, did you?’
He held up a finger, where a tiny dash of blood glistened. ‘Yep,’ he said, almost proudly. ‘But you’re worth it.’
I took the rose. He’d picked all the thorns off. I clutched it very tightly to my chest. ‘Thank you, Benji.’ I said, and gave him a shy smile. ‘And thank you for coming out here to check I was okay. It means heaps to me.’
Perhaps it was just the sun shining on his cheeks, but I think he may have blushed.
Benji shuffled a little closer. ‘Also, you know, I’m sure you and Ellie will sort it out. Maybe just give each other some space. Like, she can teach the girls her bit, and you can teach them your bit, and hopefully at some point you’ll both stop being so silly and it will all come together and then you’ll have the most awesome dance in the universe.’ He paused and tapped a finger to his chin. ‘Well, it won’t be the most awesome, because I won’t be in it, but pretty close.’
‘If you keep up like that, I’ll find all those thorns you picked off and give your attitude a sting,’ I said.
Benji clutched his heart. ‘Such sweeter words were never spoken.’
I only hoped that proved true the next time Ellie and I spoke.
If we ever did.
Chapter Eleven
Benji and I met Ash in the corridor after we came back from the rose garden.
‘Ellie’s pretty upset,’ she said, ‘but she agreed with me that she’ll spend half the lesson continuing what she’s already done with the Juniors, and you can spend the last half teaching them your chori.’
‘Ash, you must have read my mind,’ Benji said, high-fiving her. ‘That’s exactly what I said to Paige outside.’
‘Hopefully, somehow, you can put the two together,’ Ash said, but she didn’t seem so sure.
She looked exact
ly how I felt.
But Benji kept telling me I had to think positive and it would all work out, so I nodded and did my best to get it together and be professional. While we waited for Ellie to finish with the Juniors, Benji and I used the next studio to practise what we’d already made up, and even added a bit more.
I was dreading seeing Ellie when I came in to teach the group my choreography. She obviously had the same thought, though, because she’d disappeared by the time I walked in.
I was a bit disappointed at that, like somehow I thought she might have made a final effort to be involved in my piece.
Concentrate, Paige. I said to myself. Just do what you have to do and get the job done. Worry about all the other stuff later.
So I went in and faced the group like nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and Ellie and I had been planning this all along. I knew Ellie well enough to know she would have acted the same. I just hoped it wouldn’t come back to bite us on the behind later.
After I introduced Benji, who was kind enough to stick with me while I taught the lesson, I quickly explained my ideas about the choreography and the feel I was going for.
‘What’s that got to do with being an over-the-top celebrity?’ one boy said, referring to Ellie’s dance.
I quickly turned to face the mirror like I hadn’t heard. ‘Okay, the first thing,’ I pushed on, risking a quick glance at Benji, who smiled encouragingly, ‘I just want us to get down the basic jive step. Now, if any of you have seen swing dancing, it’s a bit like that, but you accent the knees more.’
‘Isn’t the jive some dance people did in the olden times?’ asked Tanesha.
I coughed nervously.
Benji spun around to my rescue. ‘Sure is,’ he said. ‘But why do you think it’s still so popular today, and that most shows and musicals use elements of it in their choreography?’ He waited for an answer, but everyone just stared back at him.
Studio Showdown Page 3
